The Caipirinha Is the Summer Cocktail You Need to Be Drinking Right Now

The best summer cocktails are those that make you feel like you're on a beach, even if you're sweating your ass off in a landlocked city with 90% humidity and no vacation days in sight. Margaritas and daiquiris are classics, sure—citrusy and light, criminally easy to drink—but if you're not drinking a caipirinha this summer, you really need to reevaluate your drinking strategy.

The drink comes from Brazil—it's often called the country's "national cocktail," but who can say if that's a real thing—and is made with cachaça, the country's most popular spirit, which is made from fermented sugar cane juice. The rest is just limes and demerara sugar, muddled together in the bottom of a glass, plus a handful of ice. It tastes, somehow, like a beach vacation: the cachaça has more depth than sweetness, carrying the flavor of sugar cane without actually being sweet; the rest is all bright citrusy tang. (Consider it the pared-down cousin of the mojito.)

It's also, forgivingly, insanely simple to make at home. Which means you can a) make one and then drink it while sitting in front of your fully-blasting AC unit, and b) very quickly make some very impressive cocktails for your friends the next time they're over. Just go to the liquor store and pick up a bottle of cachaça—there are even aged versions showing up on US shelves these days—then grab some limes and some demerara sugar at the store.

To make just one, cut half a lime into four pieces, and place it at the bottom of a glass or jar with a tablespoon of demerara sugar—it's similar to the stuff you get in those Sugar in the Raw packets at your local coffee shop, and you can find it in the baking aisle at the grocery store. Muddle them together gently—you can just use the back of a wooden spoon, or the end of a rolling pin, if you have one—then top with ice and add 1 1/2 ounces cachaça. If you want a large-scale caipirinha situation, here's a recipe for batching them up. Your bros will be very impressed.

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